NATO Summit: Who Will Foot the Bill for Long-Term Afghanistan Security?
When NATO nations meet in Chicago May 20, one question will top the agenda: What happens in Afghanistan when US combat troops leave?
To be sure, some troops from NATO countries, led by the United States, will likely stay behind after 2014 - both to train Afghans and act as a hedge against the Taliban’s return. The summit will try to iron out some of those details.
But perhaps even more crucial - certainly for Afghanistan itself - is the question of who will foot the bill for Afghans to protect themselves. Afghanistan does not have remotely enough money to defend itself. Left alone, it could afford to pay about 30,000 soldiers and police officers. Currently, with international aid, it has more than 300,000 - a number that some experts say is too low.
As a result, much of the Chicago summit will be a passing of the hat for Afghanistan. With NATO countries war-weary and economically strapped, the commitments may not exactly fill that cup to overflowing.
It points to a NATO role in Afghanistan that will continue for years after the end of the international combat mission in 2014, but at a much-reduced and still uncertain level. And it suggests that for all the heady words spoken by NATO leaders, funding and troop pledges for an event still two years away are likely to remain vague.
The two-day meeting “will be something of a tin-cup exercise and should give us some idea of what the [NATO] coalition countries’ post-2014 commitments to Afghanistan will look like,” says Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.